Tolstoy, Sharp

Read this month:

Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

The Rescuers, Margery Sharp

something else that was actually really good but which is totally escaping me right now and I am sure the title will come back to me but in the meantime I am going to worry about presenile dementia - HA! just remembered, Generation A, Douglas Coupland

Started this month and couldn't finish because its true owner took it away:

The Monster of Florence, Douglas something else

So, yuh, Anna Karenina. Where to begin. I should say that I went into this book with some preconceived notions, courtesy of my mother: she read it for a book-club when I was a teenager, and I have a very clear memory of picking it up and leafing through it in a "Huh, this is famous and I should probably have a clue what it's about" kind of a way, and she SNATCHED it away from me, and said, "No! You must _save_ this book for when you're older, because it will MEAN so much MORE to you then! You can't read Anna Karenina until your fortieth birthday!" and somehow, along with you-can't-drive-until-you're-sixteen or vote-until-you're-eighteen or drink until-you're twentyone became cemented into my head in a very permanent way. And then recently I saw an attractive-looking edition of AK (buxom beauty on the front, with bosoms and dark curls spilling out everywhere) in a used bookshop and I thought, what the hell, I'm thirtyfive now, I'm allowed to read WHATEVER I WANT. so I bought it.

I was surprised by two things, mainly: how easy a read it was, for the most part - Tolstoy has this very gossipy style and I found even his philosophizing bits to be so adolescently silly in tone that it was hard to really dig into them and try and take them seriously, so I sped through 1000+ pages in about a week, which was a surprise. The other thing that surprised me was how little _sense_ the whole thing made.

For example: Anna is described at the beginning as a wise, witty, sensible, attractive, worldly-in-a-good-way sort of person, who negotiates a domestic truce between her good-natured but sexually incontinent brother and his exasperated wife, and is an inspirational older-sister-type figure to sweet young Kitty Scherbatskaya. Count Vronksy - young, good-looking, supposedly intelligent and worldly as well, although you wouldn't know it from ANYTHING AT ALL THAT HE SAYS OR DOES THROUGHOUT THE BOOK develops a mega-crush on her with very little provocation, declaring his Eternal Love for her based on one little flirtyflirty encounter at the train station where they meet and a second one at a ball later on. Anna, in a move completely out of synch with her character as described thus far in the book, becomes his lover, and proceeds to make herself and absolutely everyone else around her miserable, especially after she runs off with him to Italy/St Petersberg, leaving her little boy behind, whom she supposedly adores, but yet she still just ups and goes to Italy knowing full well that this means she will likely never get to have any legal rights to her kid ever again.

If I were writing Anna Karenina over again, here's what I would try and do differently:

- have Vronsky be a much more interesting sympathetic character. As it is, he's just kind of a cardboard cutout of a Dashing Young Thing

- have Vronsky and Anna's relationship be actually believable and real, and not start until after they have known each other for a very long time, and have the reader witness several conversations between them that really establish that they are a match for each other in interests and intellect and sympathy and zinginess, so that when they finally do get together, you want to root for it to work out

- have Anna's feelings and behavior towards her kids be more believable. I am perfectly willing to believe that an aristocratic woman in nineteenth century Russia might have committed adultery, and might even have defiantly told her husband about it, but I CANNOT believe that even once her husband said, fine, do whatever you want so long as you're discreet, that she would have decided to publicly abandon son, house, social position, everything. me, i would have said ta, thanks very much, to my cuckolded husband, and smuggled my lover in at night when the butler and the footmen etc weren't looking, and had the best of both worlds; i wouldn't have even minded if my husband did the same. the book club meeting i went to to discuss this all agreed that 'it was perfectly normal for mothers to abandon their children vis a vis nannies and boarding schools etc.' but it's one thing for a mother to seldom see her child because the child is being raised by hired help and quite another for a mother to NEVER see her child because she was having a not-particularly-credible affair with a Dashing Young Thing and wanted to be able to spend the whole night instead of just part of the night with him?? i don't buy it.

Anyway, by the end of the book, Anna is a whining horrible clingy person, and I don't know whether Tolstoy intended to represent her as a tragic victim of her own circumstances or whether he intended her to be massively annoying, or what, but if, as the jacket copy suggested, the point of the book was to be a searing indictment of the hypocrisy of Russian society of the time, it was lost on me. Most of her problems she seemed to bring on herself and didn't actually have much to do with the hypocrisy of society.

- the whole Levin/Kitty thing was also very peculiar. Levin is the only character in the book who seems to be attempting to do something useful, running his farm and thinking about the best way to improve the lives of the peasants who work for him, but every time I started getting interested in what Levin had to say, he would go off into pastoral fantasies about how happy the simple creatures were, working all the day God gave them, and then going home whistling to their families to eat potatoes over the home hearth, and wasn't peasant life actually just idyllic, and it all got a bit too much like Marie Antoinette dressing up in "shepherdess" outfits. and why, oh why, was he so obsessed with Kitty, who was an emptyheaded cute little teenager, the female equivalent of Vronsky? Urgh! Silly!

anyway, so perhaps one of these days I will sit down and rewrite Anna Karenina. not.

The Douglas Coupland book was fun - he is a smart dude, even if all his books start to sound the same after a while, I will still keep reading them. I just wish I had discovered him when I was a teenager, because I would have REALLY loved them then. this one is about the post-apocalyptic world after the bees disappear completely and the human race is almost completely addicted to a new medication that erases any anxiety you might have about the future. we could all use some of that, hunh.

okay time to go to bed because my eyes are closing on me....

okay, so i'm a better reader than i am blogger...

Read since last post:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, Alison Hoover Bartlett
The Rape of Europa, Lynn Nichols
Neither Here Nor There, Bill Bryson
The Understudy, David Nicholls (how weird is that that I read two books this month by authors with nearly identical surnames...)
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, Thad Carhart

Seven Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton

Started reading:
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

Trailed off but still with the best of intentions of one finishing:
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

The theme of this last month's reading, in retrospect, has to do with theft and taking what doesn't belong to you. Hopefully this is not an indicator of any kleptomaniac proclivities on my part (or a foreshadowing of a major burglary. I'm just going to go and check that the doors are locked...)

My reading was a little fragmented recently due to a two week trip away from home, during which I decided to be extra-macho about how little luggage I took with me; I brought only The Inheritance of Loss, which had come with such an enthusiastic recommendation from a colleague that I was suspicious, and thus I let it languish next to my bed for ages and in fact was getting perilously close to just putting it away on a high shelf (which for me is basically admitting that I will never read it). But! having only one book while travelling is a great motivator for getting that one book read, as it turns out, and I'm REALLY glad I did, because it's really good in a phenomenally depressing kind of way. It's a family saga set in north India, and without being overly ambitious about it, Desai writes about the fortunes of a family as a miniature version of the fortunes of India as a whole in the years during and after Independence, which is to say that one horrible thing after another happens and things get more and more complicated and you begin to feel (like with so many situations involving long and violent armed conflict) that the only way to solve the problem is to go back and time and start from the very beginning. As with Rape of Europa, one of the huge huge questions that it presented (without a proper answer) is to what extent one generation must make reparations for the sins of the previous generation; in the case of Inheritance of Loss, the repercussions of the British occupation of India for 200 odd years is squeamishly painfully clear - and it begs the question that, um, even though technically India has been independent since 1946, shouldn't Britain still be making up for everything that was taken from the Indians during the occupation, because part of India's current chaos is the fault of the British administration during the Raj. Likewise in The Rape of Europa, at what point do you say, OK, enough reparation has been done for the families from whom the Nazis stole/destroyed phenomenally valuable art treasures that in many cases were irreplaceable? is there/should there be a statute of limitations? are there squatters' rights for art treasures acquired in dubious circumstances during the war?

Continuing the theme of taking what doesn't belong to you, I LOVED Allison Bartlett Hoover's book, The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, which is a book nerd's crime thriller true story about the rare book thief John Gilkey. From her portrayal of him, he seems to be a completely pathological conscience-free little git without any remorse for the consequences of his actions (and you end up really sympathizing with the book dealers who, even when the evidence of his thievery is proven, have an incredibly difficult time getting the legal system to prosecute him, mainly because (despite the fact that he stole more than $100,000 worth of books) stealing books is not a crime that's taken particularly seriously by the police). She does make the very good point, though, that there's not _that_ much that separates Gilkey from the rest of the book-lovers in the world - she herself ends up "borrowing long term" a beautiful early Renaissance German manuscript that a friend had asked her to return for him, and describes a Christie's auctioneer who found a first edition of William Blake poetry in a bureau that was up for sale, that no-one but him was aware of: "Ninety percent of me wanted to slip it into my pocket and leave for lunch, but my conscience wouldn't let me..." and the thing is, I would totally feel tempted if I saw a beautiful old book that I really wanted, lying out on some bookstall for the taking. I haven't stolen anything for years (I think the last thing was a screw from Home Depot when the line was really, really long and I had to go to the loo and didn't want to wait, and before that gummy fish from the local convenience store when I was five) but if anything was going to push me over the edge into stealing valuable objects, I think a beautiful old book would be it. Something medieval and illuminated, most likely, or one of the few Graham Oakley Church Mice books that I couldn't find on e-bay... I don't really get the appeal of the whole first edition thing, I have to admit. A handwritten manuscript would be exciting.

Neither Here Nor There doesn't have anything to do with stealing, unless you count the highway robbery of getting charged $12 for a used paperback just because I was desperate and only had three minutes to shop for something to read at the only English-language bookshop in Chiang Mai before getting on 16 hours' worth of airplanes. Bill Bryson is a frustrating writer for me, in that he occasionally makes me actually weak with laughter, and I start attracting annoyed glances from people around me because I am trying and failing to suppress all sorts of undignified snorts and giggles and whoops, and yet his attention span is distressingly short and his books (the travel ones at least) are so devoid of point. He spends about five minutes in each place he travels to, and half of the book is about checking in and out of hotels and mishaps with travellers' checks and whatever else, and you think, well, why not just stay at home, save yourself some money, think up an actual narrative, and then put the same quantity of jokes in that you would otherwise.

I don't think Sarah Thornton intended Seven Days in the Art World to be about stealing, but I certainly came away with the impression that the modern art market is one massive con. She's an anthropologist who spends a day each at a major auction house, at an art school critique, at the studio of a major production artist, at an art fair, at a gallery, etc., and just records what goes on without really imposing any judgement on any of the proceedings. The domination of 'conceptual art' in the modern art world, and the flip side of that, the dismissal of art that requires technical skill, is an interesting philosophical quandary: if Damien Hirst, for example, buys a medicine cabinet from a furniture shop, fills it with medicine bottles purchased from a pharmacy, and then calls it Art, is it worth millions? what about if he doesn't do it himself, but has one of his many employees do it, is it still Art? is it still worth millions? If people are only buying art for its value as a financial investment, and not because it is intrinsically interesting/beautiful/useful in and of itself, doesn't that mean that sooner or later the bubble will pop and it will, in fact, be a shitty financial investment? I think I was most horrified at how much the artists depended on their descriptions of their work to give it meaning - i.e. if Damien Hirst has to tell you that his medicine cabinet is art, and that it is intended to be a powerful political statement about sexual aggression and repressed despair in the search for meaning in the universe (or something), then surely it's not really art. Art should speak for itself with a minimum of explanation, shouldn't it? Then I started wondering, well, how much does knowing the story contribute to one's appreciation of, I don't know, a painting depicting a scene from classical Greek mythology? or knowing what all the objects symbolize in a Dutch Old Master? I don't think it's the same, but I can't quite articulate to myself what the difference is.

Anyway. It's freezing in here. Time to go put two jerseys on and turn the heat up.

still going strong...

Still reading:
The Rape of Europa, by Lynn Nicholas

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

Actually finished:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Schaffer
Diplomatic Baggage, by Brigid Keenan
Him Her Him Again The End of Him, by Patricia Marx
Resistance, by Owen someone or other

Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri

Map of the Harbor Islands, by J.G. Hayes

Still languishing next to my bed and starting to collect a good layer of dust:
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai

Lots read in the last two weeks, mostly because I had a few days up in Seattle, which means access to my parents' bookshelves (why are other people's books that you haven't read so much more appealing than your own unread books? it's like we get eye-fatigue from looking at the same book jackets, and thinking, nah, still not quite in the mood to read that.)

I'm not going to write about The Rape of Europa yet except to say that WOW THE NAZIS WERE MEAN EVIL PEOPLE. It feels sort of trivial to be reading a book about the fate of art in Europe during World War II, when the horrific fate of millions of people is more important.... but then a tiny little part of me, the part that might dither over saving a drowning stranger versus the last extant copy of the complete works of Shakespeare (or Nick Hornby :)), says, but hang on, what's so great about humans except for the bit of us that _produces_ sublime art, so maybe the fate of all those beautiful Vermeers and Rembrandts _is_ just as important and relevant as that of all those people who were murdered, because, let's face it, as a species we are overall fairly crap. The thing that gets me most I think is the vicious hypocrisy in the policies: "degenerate art" should be destroyed because it's bad for humanity & artists/dealers should be severely punished for creating it/dealing it, BUT "degenerate art" basically meant whatever Hitler didn't like (Van Gogh, Picasso, the impressionists) which was difficult to predict until you actually stuck the artwork in question in front of him, and then although the official word was "destroy all degenerate art" half the Nazi war effort was funded with the millions they made on the black market selling other people's stolen art. I think the paintings I'm saddest about are the disappeared Vermeers. There was a bit in one of the early chapters that almost made me cry: during the Spanish Civil War, the Escorial near Madrid was bombed, and so the curators of the Prado realized that they needed to get their artwork out of the museum posthaste, as it was only a matter of time before a bomb hit the Prado. They arranged a caravan of high security trucks to transport the most valuable of the Prado's collection through the night to some underground vault in Valencia, and (this is part that got me), all through the night, regular citizens stood by the road along the route as these enormous trucks carrying the rolled up Velazquezes and Goyas, and as soon as the trucks had passed, they would go home and telephone the curators at the Prado (who were presumably biting their nails the whole night long) to say that so far the trucks were safe.

I'm realizing I've been on a little bit of a Second World War binge this last couple of weeks: Resistance was a fairly crapulent (I thought) overly pathetique imagining of a German occupation of a small Welsh valley in 1940 something - the general framework of the story is solid (seven small farms in a valley, German soldiers are coming, women wake up one morning to find all their menfolk have disappeared in the night to join the underground Welsh resistance, Germans arrive, women have to cooperate but can't give any information about their husbands away, German soldiers get snowed into the valley with them over the winter and truthfully are quite glad that their commanders seem to have forgotten about them because they're tired of being soldiers and just want to go back to being regular guys again, German soldiers plus abandoned farmwives end up leaning on each other to survive the winter, winter's over and valley opens again - dilemma of what to do.) but the prose is dreadful dreadful. No one in the book has even a glimmering of dimensionality to them, and I got very fed up with them all by the end the snow melted, and it was quite hard to care about what happened in the end.

THAT said, I loved loved loved the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (despite the retarded chick-lit title). Such a sweet book. It was a perfect antidote to all the macho misanthrope of Martin Amis, John Updike et al: intelligent, but warm and kind, and everyone in the book is a good person! that you would enjoy spending an evening with! possibly more! funny and yet with depth! Also about the (this time real) German occupation of the Channel Islands, it starts off very fluffy, and then slowly gets into more stern stuff, but the principal characters are so charming that there is almost a pleasantness to the ache of the sterner stuff. I think I have said before too that I do have a weakness for epistolary novels - it's the voyeurism of getting to read something that doesn't belong to you, maybe.

Diplomatic Baggage and Him Her Him Again The End of Him were both unabashed fluff. You don't need to read either of them. Diplomatic Baggage is a slightly self-serving string of anecdotes as told by a woman who has spent the last two decades trailing around after her husband on his various diplomatic missions - she expresses exactly the same amount of angst over Rwandan genocide as she does over having to organize a dinner party for six, and it could come off as cute and Bridget-Jones-like, but at least Bridget doesn't include both in the same _book_. The Patricia Marx book was funny (and she is a better writer than Brigid Keenan as well) but it also felt a bit too trivial - books that are entirely about women completely obsessed with men who are bad for them feel tedious to me now, which is either a sign that I am growing up or that I am an unsympathetic cow, not sure which.

The last book I am going to write about before I crap out and go to bed is The Map of the Harbor Islands which has been sitting in my brain ever since I finished it (late last night, one a.m., definitely past my bed time), and refusing to go away, saying thinkaboutmethinkaboutmethinkaboutme. The recommendation came from a source I was a little unsure about, book-taste-wise, but I was assured it was the Best Book EVER, and I have to admit, it's definitely got something. There's a lot in it, to start off with; there are a lot of words in this book and it might even qualify for quasi-saga-hood. The gist is as follows: two boyhood friends (the narrator, Danny, and his best friend Petey) are enjoying their rough-and-tumble South Boston Irish-Catholic semi-squalid but basically happy normal childhood until Petey gets bonked on the head by a baseball and emerges from his head injury a different person: he becomes totally unselfconscious, a truth-speaking angel full of poetry and love for the universe and the earth, (and an unrealistically literate and abstract thinker, for a twelve-year-old, I will also throw in) and, to the major freakout of Danny, Petey also announces that he is gay. Danny is a much more ordinary kid destined for ordinary join-marines-get-crap-job-settle-down-with-highschool-girlfriend life, and the rest of the book is about Danny's growing up and coming to terms with his love for his friend and thinking about stretching his own boundaries and making the most of his own life beyond the ordinary crap that's in the cards for him, and it definitely got its hooks into me, this book, even despite a few passages which stretched credulity, and another few which talked about God (as in the Irish Catholic version of God) in a way that seemed to imply that organized religion and homosexuality in America were PERFECTLY COMPATIBLE, no PROBLEM, you just have to think about it the right way and hang out only with the twinkly-eyed smart nuns rather than the evil spiritually-limited ruler-wielding ones... hmm, yeah, I have my doubts about that. But J.G.Hayes is definitely a smart and thougtful cookie, and kudos to him for writing a book that is going to keep me thinking about the exact nature of love for a while to come.

HA! i'm reading again!

Read (or at least started):
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
At the Same Time, Susan Sontag
Magical Changes, Graham Oakley (does this count? it's all pictures. my kind of book, man)
The Rape of Europa,
Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri
random book titled something like "Character Analysis in the work of Enid Blyton" that I picked up in Powells because I could NOT believe that someone would write a serious book about this, but hey, they did.

Stuff I want to read:
fictionalized biography of Artmesia Gentileschi, by Anna Banti
Biography of Arthur Ransome, by Roland someone
Swallowdale, by Arthur Ransome, and THEN all the other Swallows and Amazons books
Twilight series, by Stephanie whosit

I haven't actually, you know, FINISHED, anything to speak of, but at least I have rolled eyeballs over print enough to qualify as reading the last week or so, which is better than I was doing before.
I did end up starting Infinite Jest; obviously I'm nowhere near finished with it because it's like five million very dense pages, but so far thumbs up. I'm skipping the footnotes, I've decided; the flow thing is more important, and while I do sympathize to a certain extent with the common criticism of his work that it is too self-consciously show-offy, it's FUN how much he knows about everything, and has this extensive and very precisely applied vocabulary (i.e., not just gratuitous big words, but perfectly placed accurate vocabulary that gives you a little tickle of pleasure of OHHHHH how nice that he put that word _there_ exactly where it belongs, and it's a word you only hear once every ten years so it makes you happy that it is still not just getting used but getting used in the right place to mean its right thing.) On a slightly unrelated note, it has occurred to me before that in English-foreign language translation dictionaries, especially ones that include slang or very idiomatic terms, they should also include an appropriate frequency for each phrase. "cool" can be used once every five minutes, easily, without being egregious, for example; "all that and a bag of chips" should be limited to once a year, at most; I have restricted my mother to "getting up at the butt-crack [of dawn]" to once every ten years, not that she respects that boundary. I think it would be really useful when learning a foreign language to give you a sense of how often you can use a given word or phrase without sounding weird. Anyway. So so far I heart Infinite Jest, and I do feel happy to be getting in on the tail end of the whole grassroots thing of 'Infinite Summer' (the project of reading Infinite Jest this summer, which may be just a Bay Area? thing or a U.S. thing? I don't know - as a tribute to DFW's life and horrific early death. So tremendously sad when smart funny people can't find enough to be worth living for.)
The other book which I am going to claim I finished (even though I skipped one of the longer middle essays) was a book of Susan Sontag essays, "At the Same Time," which was compiled posthumously. I will admit to having Trouble with a capital T with some of them: she nearly lost me with the first one, which is sort of a weird abstract pseudophilosophical meandering about the meaning of Beauty, and what beauty means and how it's defined and how it relates to ethical/moral issues and cultural standards and I found myself losing patience just a wee wee bit with it because a) her attempt to define beauty isn't really going to change what anyone else finds beautiful (I don't think) and b) I am the world's least abstract thinker. I do think that beauty is not as visceral a decision as we might like to think: I have grown out of liking a lot of pieces of art that I really liked 10-20 years ago, and come to really like several other things that I hated as a teenager, in large part because of extra stuff I have learned about the cultural context/artist's intention/etc, but I don't think Susan Sontag (or Oscar Wilde, or Plato, or anyone else) philosophizing about the meaning of beauty is going to do much to change what is ultimately a fairly visceral reaction to a piece of art/music; you love it, or you don't love it. Ennyway. She also does this thing of referring to herself obliquely as this ultra-highbrow persecuted intellectual character, and it just seems a little bit snotty to refer to yourself as one of the last remaining smart people in the world, the last guardian of the True Culture and the Intelligentsia. meh, get over yourself.

The essay that most most grabbed me in the Susan Sontag book was a review of a fictionalized biography by Anna Banti about the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi. First off, wow, what a great name, to be called Artemisia is pretty fantastic, and secondly wow, fantastic to be a successful (and apparently good) painter in Florence in the 1600's, in a world completely totally utterly dominated by men made me feel so vicariously proud and woohoo, you go sister! The part of the essay that was a little bit disheartening was where she talked about the decision that women (still) have to make about basically being hyperproductive in their life's work or having a family, and how that is not a choice that men really have to make. "For a woman to be free, free as a man, means choices - sacrifices - sufferings that a man may choose but is not obliged to incur... Feminism has meant many things... about justice and dignity and liberty - to which almost all independent women would adhere if they did not fear the retaliation that accompanies a word with such a sulfurous reputation... that feminism suggests an avowal of strength - and a denial of the difficulty and the cost for women in being strong (above all, the cost in masculine support and affection)." I don't know how Susan Sontag felt about masculine support and affection, but I for one am grateful for what I got in that arena, and would be loath to give it up, although I think I am as guilty as the next woman in terms of not infrequently deferring to men without really thinking about it too hard, which I am sure has cost me in productivity points. Anyway, I am undecided about Susan Sontag, but I'm definitely going to read Anna Banti's book about Artemisia at some point.

I finally started the Jhumpa Lahiri, although haven't gotten far enough into it to be able to decide yet whether I like it; I don't think I'm ever going to be able to get over how much I liked her first book, Interpreter of Maladies. I also yesterday went on a pilgrimage to Powell's bookstore in Portland - my first time ever; next time I go I am bringing a sleeping bag and a campstove and just staying there for a week or two, or until they kick me out, whichever is longer - and I bought a nonfiction account of the Nazi pillage of so-called "degenerate" art from Jewish collectors which I am twenty pages into and which I can tell is going to be just whoppingly depressing, with lots of destroyed paintings and murdered artists and the whole bit) as well as a Graham Oakley children's picture book called Magical Changes, which is AWESOME. that dude is a genius. I am not surprised his books are going for $200 a pop on ebay. (I looked for the Church Mice books, in vain, but I did find a hilarious 'Guide To Enid Blyton's Characters' which offered a semi-serious brief psychoanalysis of all the major players (George/Julian/Dick/Anne/Timmy the dog/Silky/Moonface etc etc) as well as books 3-8 of the Swallows and Amazons series, which I recently re-read book one of, and decided it was excellent. I didn't BUY books 3-8 because I need to read book TWO (Swallowdale) first, and of course they didn't HAVE book two... I also looked for the new biography of Arthur Ransome (author of the Swallows and Amazons series) which my sister sent me a link about which sounds FASCINATING - he apparently (in order to escape a tedious marriage) got himself sent as a journalist/spy to Bolshevik Russia and was there for the revolution, had a long term affair with Trotsky's personal secretary (whom he later married), worked in China for a bit as a journalist/British Foreign Office having all sorts of hairy adventures, and it wasn't until he was in his forties that he came back to the UK and settled down in the Lake District to write these gorgeously appealing kids' books about sailing and pirates.

I also might have to read the vampire Twilight series, as I have now heard it's fun from several people. hmm. we'll see. I might have to read it in secret when nobody's watching. We have to at least pretend to maintain some pretense at High Cultcha.

All the books I haven't read...

okay this blog post is about all the books I have not read this month. are you ready? the list is horrifically long. _The Inheritance of Loss_, by Kiran Desai, comes top; I have had this book recommended to me over two years, in my possession for one year, next to my bed for SIX MONTHS, and still can't get myself to read it. There's something about the turquoise cover and cursive script on the front that makes me think it's not going to make me laugh, and I have been wanting a good laugh recently.
I have also failed to read _Infinite Jest_ (David Foster Wallace; I really really liked the idea of 'Infinite Summer' when I heard about it, but was thwarted by the number of people who also apparently really really liked the idea and who bought out the local bookshop/borrowed all the copies from the Santa Rosa library. Why am I bothering to resist Amazon? I don't know. I don't want to spend full price for a book that will lurk under my bed for six months. I'd rather wait until the next copy comes back to the library (in 2014, judging from the wait list for it) or until I've forgotten that I wanted to read it, whichever comes first.
Next comes _Map of the Harbor Islands_, which I think (based on the first two pages and dust jacket) is going to be sort of a gay coming-of-age tale; another one which was recommended to me eons ago. It was recommended so earnestly as The Best Book Ever Written that I did actually look on Amazon for it, but couldn't find a copy for less than thirty dollars, which I will not pay unless the earnest recommender is someone whose taste lines up with mine on every. single. point., from the Just So stories to the New Yorker to, oh, god, I don't know, something that only I like that no-one else likes, like eating lemons, or foot-washing right before bed. Now I have a borrowed copy. We'll see if the magic happens.
Also borrowed is the latest Jhumpa Lahiri novel. I'm nervous about this one: I loved loved loved loved loved loved loved the Interpreter of Maladies SO MUCH I just wanted to marry it oh my god what a perfect little book that was. And then she wrote the Namesake and I was so excited because it was like, wow, a whole juicy novel, what a treat this is going to be, and then it kind of wasn't - a little bit of the Martin Amis problem again, that none of the characters (at least in the younger generation) were actually that sympathetic, and the older generation felt almost caricaturey in their "why don't you get married to a nice Indian girl otherwise you will bring shame on the family"ness. So I'm skittish about the new book. It's on the trunk in my bedroom. It hasn't made it to the floor next to the bed stack. I avoid making direct eye contact with it. I think maybe if I just live with it for a little while I might get less afraid of it, and one day I'll pick it almost accidentally, like "oh, wait, what's this again?" and sort of flip through the pages in a casual sort of way, as if I'm not actually reading it, I just wanted to check out the type face, because I'm suddenly feeling really interested in font design, and then something catches my eye, and then ha! I'm in. It might work.
I saw Julie and Julia the other night (movie, Meryl Streep) which made me want to read Julia Child's _Mastering the Art of French Cooking_, since it sounds like it might be a) good for me in an improving educational sort of way and b) quite a chatty fun cookbook, sort of Jane Grigsonish, but I can't think about food right now, because I just went out for a medium-epic dinner with friends and am bulging at the seams. Tomorrow will contemplate.
I am embarrassed to admit what I am reading instead: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. I can't help it. I need something cheerful, undemanding, familiar at night to fall asleep. It's not a book, it's a sedative, a transition prop to get my brain to shut up about all the things knocking around in it leftover from the day (I need to clean the kitchen, I need to fill out my licensing paperwork, I need to finish painting, I need to send off my tax thing, I need to exercise, I need to ring xyz specialist about xyz patient) so that I can go to sleep. I read three pages and I'm out cold, happy sound sleep, with no side effects, unless you count happy, vaguely erotic dreams about Daniel Radcliffe and what a little hottie he is turning into. I used to use the Stalky & Co. stories for my bedtime sedative, until I found out that Kipling based the character of Beetle on himself, and somehow I found that obnoxious and couldn't read them anymore.
I will start reading more, I promise, since I have discovered that the universe is punishing me for not reading the last couple of months: I found out that Nick Hornby himself, unknowing spirit guide of this blog, is going to be in San Francisco, reading at City Arts and Lectures at a benefit thingy for 823 Valencia, at the beginning of October, and it is SOLD OUT. Full on tragic, man. Next time. Nick, if only you knew us, I know you'd like us, really.

Martin Amis, The Information

Book I just finished reading: Martin Amis, The Information

Book this blog entry will be about: Martin Amis, The Information

Book that was the bane of my existence for the last two weeks: Martin Amis, The Information

Book that I can't decide whether I liked or hated: Martin Amis, The Information.

My sister suggested that I restrict each post to just one or two books so that she doesn't have to wade through pages and pages of rambling (or rather she still does, but if it's only one book at a time she doesn't have to lose her place in the rambling) so, here goes, What I Thought of Martin Amis' The Information.

First off, sorry, but this is a mean boy book, and I don't mean this in the John Grisham sense of the term - I can deal with evil corporate lawyers and their scheming, since you know the good guys will win in the end - more in the Saul Bellow/John Updike sense, where everyone is mired in their lives of quiet desperation and unhappy tense marriages that are seething with horrific untold secrets and bad behavior but everyone keeps playing bridge and drinking cocktails anyway. It's the combination of hyperarticulateness combined with a teensy bit of arrogance about said hyperarticulateness that results in a misanthropic miasma over the whole book, and the poor reader (me) feeling alternately too stupid to be an adequate audience for all the literary gymnastics and irritated at him for thinking he's that much cleverer than the entire rest of the world. Minor revelation: the act of reading (I am thinking of this for the first time, so this thought might not come out right, but bear with me) puts the reader in the same situation as the _characters_: i.e. none of you really know what's going to happen next, you're all quite invested in finding _out_ what's going to happen next, and you're all at the whim of the author, so when the author creates mostly despicable characters you feel depressed yourself, lumped in with all these people who cheat on their spouses and spend their child support money on drugs and sabotage their friends' careers out of jealousy (just to pluck a few random examples out of the air), even if you yourself are a decent-ish person who doesn't do any of those things. Yes, I think that's it.

He (Martin Amis) is indubitably a fantastic writer on a sentence-by-sentence basis: there were some really, really, really nice phrases that just stopped me in my tracks (although if the writing stops you from continuing to read is that good writing? hmm. to ponder), and a few metaphors that had me giving little out-loud grunts of pleasure. I didn't, of course, bring the book with me to the coffee-shop where I am sitting now - in fact, it was a loaner copy, so it is out of my hands forever - so I can't flip through and look for particularly juicy ones, but I do remember "the eye-hurting metallic colour of the sky" in Miami mmmmm yes eye-hurting perfect adjective.

HOWEVER, big-picture beef with this book (I won't say Martin Amis, since I haven't read any of his other novels, but I am definitely wary) is the lack of any even remotely sympathetic character anywhere in the book - they really are all either stupid, mean, petty, grasping, unreliable, psychotic, or a combination of the above - and the stops and starts in the plot. It was a bit like an opera, in that the action happens in brief flurries of slightly wacky recitative (which if you haven't read the plot synopsis in the program might not make a whole lot of sense), and then everyone stands around and sings for ten minutes about how they feel about what just happened. Sort of the same with this except it doesn't come with a handy plot synopsis, so when on the third to last page there was an apparent child-abduction followed by random release of unharmed same, another character getting assaulted (vs. murdered, I couldn't tell), and either a spontaneous or purposely-staged episode of cheating spouse caught in flagrante with vengeful backstabbing friend, after pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of nothing happening, I was totally thrown for a loop.

I will sneak in a brief mention of The Piano Teacher, by Janice Lee, which I am probably not going to finish. I was hoping a dumb novel about glamorous 1930's Hong Kong would be full of spicy sex and political intrigue, but the spice/intrigue/glamour factor is, I think, too far outweighed by the dumbness. I'll give it another chapter before I pack it in...

Heller, Townsend, Undset

Book I am reading right now (or at least I would be if I weren't blogging):

Martin Amis, The Information

Zoe Heller, The Believers

Books on my to-read list recently recommended:

The Birth of Plenty, William Bernstein
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino
Divisadero, Michael Ondaatje
Independent People, Haldor Laxness

Re-reads for comfort:

The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, Douglas Adams

one of the Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfael medieval murder mysteries, can't remember the title

The Water Babies, Charles whosiwhatsit

Boy & Going Solo, Roald Dahl

New books actually read:
Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, Sue Townsend
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset

Notes on a Scandal, Zoe Heller

lots of New Yorkers (finally caught up!)

Books bought:
The Piano Teacher, Janice Lee
When Will There Be Good News?, Kate Atkinson

the Zoe Hellers

I am finding it more and more difficult to be scrupulously honest about what I am reading, because setting myself the project of writing about it publicly makes me realize a) how much brain candy I read b) how much comfort re-reading of old books I do and c) how disorganized I am about having multiple books going simultaneously, depending on what happens to be next to the bed when bedtime rolls around. Oh, well. Luckily I don't think anyone's actually _reading_ this :).

Several of the books this month were picked up in an airport bookshop, so they come with the extra adrenaline-soaked frisson of having nearly missed a plane in order to purchase them (I got myself into a state of metaphysical crisis over the 4-books-for-the-price-of-3 deal: really I could only justify buying two for the plane ride, but then three is so _close_ to two, and once you have bought three then you get the fourth one _anyway_... oh GOD. I bought four, and just barely made it onto the flight in time.

The Martin Amis and the first Zoe Heller I am going to leave for another time, BUT I loved loved loved Notes on a Scandal. I definitely have a weakness for novels narrated by a character who is delusional about their own role in what is going on around them (viz: Kashuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day; John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure oh god, and of course, Lolita, favourite book of all time) and Notes on a Scandal is quite delicious on this score. (I had already seen the film, yay Cate Blanchett and Judi Dench, and liked it, and so was very pleased that the book-being-better-than-the-film rule also held true in this case.) Brief summary: young posh arty bohemian new teacher in enormous rough-and-tumble London comprehensive school befriends slightly creepy (as we discover) older female teacher, has affair with fifteen year old student, confides in older teacher, things go pear-shaped from there. I also love books with an edge of moral ambiguity: on the face of things, you think, "Teacher having affair with fifteen year old student? that's disgraceful/immoral/terrible; she should know better!" and then you read the story, and you start thinking, hm, well, I kind of see how she could have gotten into it... There is an interesting bit where the older teacher (who narrates the story) is trying to justify to herself the younger teacher's actions, and she asks how many of us can say that we have never had sexual thoughts about someone inappropriate (presumably meaning a minor, a relative, the partner of a close friend, etc. etc.), and extrapolating from there, if that person then suddenly took the initiative with you, are you sure you'd be so well-behaved...? and you think, oh my god, could I be the next Mary Kay LeTourneau? do I have that in me? I haven't seduced any underage patients yet, but I'll be sure and post it if I do, in the interests of science.

Speaking of unreliable narrators, Adrian Mole was the guilty pleasure of the month, although a mixed pleasure at this point. The self-absorbed cluelessness that made his adolescent diaries so hilarious and endearing becomes nearly excruciating to witness in an adult (in this last installment he is now in his mid-thirties, divorced with two kids) and the possibility of a genuinely happy ending for him seems infinitesimally small (is it possible to strip yourself of all your dearly held fantasies about yourself and do a total realignment with reality in order to trade in your insecurities after your teenage years? I am skeptical), although Sue Townsend does very gamely keep trying to provide him with true love and reality in equal doses, despite his gigantic, horrific character flaws. (In this installment, he becomes accidentally engaged to a terrifyingly neurotic Georgian dollhouse enthusiast named Marigold, extricates himself at the very last minute, and semi-inexplicably ends up with Marigold's sexy, rich, cosmopolitan, beautiful sister Daisy. We don't ever really get given an adequate Daisy's-eye view of him, particularly, but by the end of the book I was so desperate for him to get himself out of all his various disasters that I was more than willing to accept last-minute salvation by an attractive sane new girlfriend.

Last but not least on the new-books read: the long awaited Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy (I read The Wreath and The Wife; The Cross is going to have to wait until my next trip to the UK,where the book got left.) I had been saving it for this trip, and it turned out to be a nice concordance of length/heft of book to free reading time. It is an odd, odd book in several ways: it was written I think in the 1920's (in Norwegian), and Sigrid Undset won the Nobel Prize for Literature for it, which seems pretty avant garde, no? that a 1000+ page rambling proto-feminist family saga in Norwegian would be the pick of that year? The other thing that was odd was how _modern_ it felt - it's set in the fourteenth century, and I have always thought of historical fiction as being a relatively new genre: most 18th, 19th, and early 20th century novels are just set when they're written, as far as I know. I was a bit nervous starting it, as I had premonitions of tedium (understandable, given the length) and of too many characters (I was flipping back to the family tree thing in the front constantly when I read A Hundred Years of Solitude and it got frankly old) but actually it was fine on both counts.

The story follows Kristin from happy childhood on farm to dramatic elopement with and subsequent marriage to a difficult (for lack of a more unifying descriptor) man to motherhood. According to the introduction, it also goes through to her death at age __ of ___: I couldn't BELIEVE the guy who wrote the preface would drop that bomb on the second page of the introduction!! boo on him. but I didn't read the third book on purpose; I am hoping that by the time I get around to it I will have forgotten about the spoiler in the introduction and thus can jump into the third part of the trilogy with a clean slate). I was impressed by how earthy, overall, the writing was: there are descriptions of childbirth and breastfeeding and sex that, while they're not gratuitously gross or anything, leave you in absolutely no doubt that the author has experienced all those things firsthand and is not going to bother being coy about it (which again, feels very modern for the 1920's.). I did get a bit irritated with old Kristin towards the middle, I have to admit; she is touted on the back cover as a Strong Independent-Minded Woman, and yet she lets herself be seduced by a guy who is actually a bit of a drip, and not only sticks around to have about a million kids with him, she also does the irritating thing of continually misreporting her emotions, by which I mean: 'Kristin lay in Erlend's arms; although it was great to finally be in bed with him, she felt totally miserable because she knew how badly she was betraying her family and how incredibly disappointed her parents would be in her for letting herself be seduced by such a drip because even though she loved him w/ all her heart blah blah she realized he was a bit of a drip.' Then later on, 'Kristin was really pissed off with Erlend for being such a drip but she stayed with him because of the memory of how happy she had been that first time when she lay in his arms..." and you think, hunh? wait, she wasn't happy then either! wtf! why is this supposedly Strong Independent Woman making such drippy decisions for herself? anyway. I'll get over it.

I'm not going to write about my comfort re-reading this month, except to say that re-reading Boy and Going Solo was a bittersweet experience: I loved both those books when I was younger, and now, as with other previously intense childhood loves (the Narnia series, The Sound of Music), they are starting to look embarrassingly dated. Boy not so much, because his life is limited to family and school, which are fairly transcendent experiences that we can all relate to (and he does a brilliant job of bringing his childhood voice to immediate and vivid life) but for the first time I noticed uncomfortable patriotic/colonialist overtones in Going Solo, and a few bits had me wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing la la la while I read.

OH and one more very, very important set of books on the to-read list: I recently discovered there are MORE THAN THREE of Graham Oakley's fantastic Church Mice books. I got on Amazon and ebay, and they are out of print and selling used for up to several hundred dollars a pop, which is terrifying but understandable, given just how TOTALLY AND UTTERLY FANTASTIC they are. I bid on two that were in Australia, going for thirty dollars each, but I lost the auction. So put the word out: if anyone, anywhere, sees any Graham Oakley Church Mice books (other than the three I already have, which are The Church Mouse, The Church Mice Spread Their Wings, and The Church Mice Go to the Moon) buy 'em and either make a fortune re-selling them on ebay or, better yet, give them to me as a Christmas present...